Rockstuhl, Harald (Hrsg.) Heiligenstadt. Luftbild-Atlas. Luftbilder 1930-2015. Eichsfeld

The contents: Aerial photographs 1930-1940, 1963 and 1966; US reconnaissance flights 1944 and 1945; aerial photographs 1985, 1989, 2011 and 2015.

Heiligenstadt was mainly photographed from the air from around 1930. Most of the aerial photographs were taken by private companies. Local bookshops bought the images from these companies and sold them as picture postcards. One of these was Hansa-Luftbild. This company was founded in 1923 as Aero Lloyd Luftbild-Gesellschaft in Berlin. Three years later - in 1926 - it was taken over by Lufthansa AG and renamed Hansa Luftbild. The company Industriefotografen Klinke & Co. from Berlin also took photographs of Heiligenstadt. This company was entered in the Berlin commercial register in 1927 as Photographische Werkstätten, Illustrations- und Postkartenverlag. From around 1933, the postcards bore the inscription "Released by the R.L.M. test centre" or similar. On 2 February 1933, the decree on the Reichskommissar für die Luftfahrt (Reich Commissioner for Aviation) was issued, and the test centre was soon established. Numerous US reconnaissance flights took place over Heiligenstadt in 1944 and 1945. Today unique documents. Flights on 26 December 1944, 22 February 1945 and 20 March 1945 are known. After the capture of Heiligenstadt by American units in April 1945, US reconnaissance flights followed - on 16 May, 19 July and 22 July 1945. Heiligenstadt was handed over to the Red Army in July 1945. Soviet aeroplanes photographed almost all of Thuringia in 1953. There are no known photographs of Heiligenstadt. There are a few postcards with aerial photographs of Heiligenstadt from 1963 and 1966, but there are hardly any similar photographs of other towns in Thuringia from that time. These were produced by the photographic publisher Reinhard Kallmer from Zwickau. INTERFLUG took precise photographs of Heiligenstadt on behalf of the state survey on 12 May 1980, 22 May 1985 and 5 October 1989. Military objects were blacked out. On 12 July 2011, author and editor Harald Rockstuhl flew to Heiligenstadt for the book "Die Unstrut aus der Luft" (The Unstrut from the air). These photos can also be found in this edition.